An often enjoyable but ultimately forgettable romance.
A light, entertaining novel that’s part love story, part travelogue.
When perennial playboy David Summers meets journalist Catherine Klein, their attraction is immediate and powerful. The two soon start meeting in cities all over the world for clandestine rendezvous, with David never suspecting that Catherine harbors a secret. It’s one that’s more suburban than steamy: She’s married to a stay-at-home father who tends to their young son, Billy. Catherine promises herself that she’ll either end the affair or tell David the truth, but she finds herself dangerously hooked on the relationship’s animal eroticism—until an explosive confrontation forces her hand. The story gets off to a somewhat slow start, describing glamorous locales in Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Los Angeles in excruciating detail while all but neglecting character development. Scene after scene features impossibly beautiful people in impossibly expensive clothing enjoying themselves in impossibly exclusive bars and hotels, establishing the work as pure escapist fantasy. However, as Catherine and David’s relationship intensifies, the story gains a bit more depth, although Catherine herself remains disappointingly underdeveloped. The story could have depicted her as complex and conflicted, but readers are told early on that she finds life with her husband stultifying and that she yearned to be away from her son even shortly after his birth, and as a result, the affair comes off as somewhat trite. Still, the erotic interplay between Catherine and David is satisfyingly sizzling, and some of their later trips are simply glorious—particularly a South African jaunt. The book provides some elegantly spare insights (“I sometimes worry that we are a relationship of vacations, of interconnected summer romances”) but also some overblown prose (“In the night sky, a cry erupts that ricochets from the far reaches of the horizon like a high-pitched whale [sic] released from her soul that aches in its tone before coming to a desperate guttural surge she repeats into the night sky as she comes into view”). Unfortunately, when this “relationship of vacations” gets to a point where it either must become something more or dissolve altogether, the lackluster conclusion lacks emotional resonance.
An often enjoyable but ultimately forgettable romance.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483404110
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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